Creating a Brand Online

The Internet and sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have made the need for personal branding more pressing than ever.  Personal branding is an absolute necessity for entrepreneurs, executives, small business owners and job seekers alike.  Literally hundreds of people are branding themselves as experts in your field every day.  Showcasing your talents and positioning yourself as an authority in your industry will go a long way toward helping you reach your professional and personal goals.

I have laid out the following 10 steps that you can take today to get started toward building a brand on the Internet. 

1. Determine Current Visibility – As with any marketing initiative, it is important to establish a benchmark for measuring your success.  Start by performing a Google (Yahoo and Bing) search for your name and any variations of your name.  What comes up?  Are you there at all?  Is there anything negative about you that you don’t want people to see?  Take note of how many instances are referring to you on the first 2 pages of results.
2. Identify Your Brand Attributes – What makes you unique, authentic, different, relevant and compelling?  In other words, why should I listen to you as opposed to the thousands of other “experts” in your industry?  What do you promise?  What value will I get from working with or hiring you?  What are your goals?  What is your purpose?  What are your passions?  I know these are very abstract ideas, but I encourage you to really take some time answering these questions and others like them.  It will become your brand message and should be resonated in everything you do.
3. Create a Brand Message/Mission Statement – If you have really put some time and thought into step 2, you should have a list of words and ideals that really move you.  If you don’t, go back and do step 2 again.  You should be able to create a sentence or two that describes why you are unique, relevant and compelling and at the same time motivates you to want to succeed.
4. Register Your Domain Name – Do you own your own domain name (e.g. www.yourname.com)?  If not, go register the domain right now.  I personally like GoDaddy.com.  Domains will cost you about $10 for a year.  Go with a .com and NOT a .net or .us or .tv or anything else.  Register your domain as your first and last name.  No middle initials, no hyphens or underscores.  If you want to get those domain names too, that is up to you, but make sure you get www.firstnamelastname.com at the very least.  If you have a very popular name like John Smith, you may find that www.johnsmith.com it is already taken.  In this case, it is best to add something about you professionally to the end as in www.johnsmithartist.com.
5. Build a Website – There are many options for creating or having a website developed.  Depending on your needs and level of understanding, you may need to outsource this to an interactive marketing consultant.  For personal branding purposes, you do not need a lot of functionality, disk space or bandwidth to get started.  This website will become the central repository for you to showcase your talents and demonstrate your expertise.  At the very least, you will want to have a blog included in the website.  Ideally, you will also provide other proof of your past performances such as testimonials, work samples, articles, press releases, pod casts, how to videos, photos etc.  The tool that I found that works wonders, and provides all of this functionality without the need to know how to program, is WordPress.  WordPress has tons of templates to choose from and hundreds of plug-ins to give your site a unique look and feel with all the functionality of a big corporate site.  Best of all, it is free.
6. Remember Brand Image – It is important to point out here that your image is a big part of your brand.  As such, I would recommend getting a professional portrait taken for use on your website and social networking sites.  Pictures of you and the cat just won’t cut it in the business world.  I recommend Sears Portrait Studios.  They have locations everywhere, take appointments every day and are relatively inexpensive.  You may also want to consider creating a logo, or having one created for you.  Use the logo everywhere you can.
7. Increase Your Visibility – Now that you have a professional portrait, a working value statement/brand message and a presence on the World Wide Web, it is time to increase your visibility.  One of the quickest and easiest ways to do so is to register on as many social media networking sites as you can.  Start by going to Zoominfo.com and claiming your profile.  Chances are they already have a profile of you and that it just needs to be updated.  Next, register and create profiles on LinkedIn.com, Twitter.com, Facebook.com and other sites like eCademy.com, Spoke.com, Ryze.com, Ziki.com, and Friendfeed.com.  It is important to fill out as much of your profile information on each of these sites as you can, including links back to your website and blog.  Once you have created a profile for one of them, (i.e. LinkedIn) it will be easy to create the others by copying and pasting the information from one to the others.  I wouldn’t worry too much about maintaining all of these accounts.  I actively use Facebook for personal networking and LinkedIn for professional networking.  Using a service like ping.fm allows you to post status updates to all your profiles at the same time and even from your cell phone.
8. Remove Negatives – If when you performed the Google search in step 1 you found that there were some things out there about you that are less than favorable, you need to do your best to remove them.  If the content is on a site or profile that you have control over this is pretty easy – remove it.  If the content is on someone else’s site or profile, you can certainly ask them to remove it.  If they refuse to do so, then steps 4-7 will help get you on the way to at least pushing that stuff off the first page of results.
9. Give to Get – Remember that social networking is all about building relationships.  As with any healthy relationship, you get out what you put in.  Recommend people that you know or have done business with on LinkedIn.  Reference other people’s work in your blog and articles.  Digg the stories that you like and bookmark good content on sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon.  Remember people’s birthdays and special events using AmericanGreetings.com.  You will be surprised how quickly these things find there way back to you.
10. Monitor Your Brand – Once you have all these pieces in place, it is a good idea to continue to monitor your brand’s reach and visibility.  Perform routine Google searches to see how well you are showing up over time.  Another cool tool is Addictomatic.com which will allow you to create a dashboard on any given topic to see where and how it is showing up online.  Enter your name in there and see how your word is starting to spread.

This is a shortened and simplified social media branding strategy, but this will work as a great head start for personal branding and as a corporate branding strategy.  There is obviously a lot more that can be done and a lot more that will be revealed as you move along this path.  If you follow these 10 steps, you will be well on your way to owning your brand on the Internet and mastering the World Wide Web 2.0.